Saturday, March 29, 2014

Earth Hour, or Welcome to the Dark Side

Today, March 25, 2017, is Earth Hour.It reminded me of a column I wrote a few years ago on the occasion of this worldwide event—about how the problem today isn't too much light, but not enough darkness, and how that might affect the popularity of light as a spiritual metaphor.

In 1610, the
famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei published a book about the stars and
planets he observed in the sky above Padua.

Although his homemade telescope was
less powerful than most beginners’ telescopes sold today, he made some
remarkable discoveries about the moon, planets and the Milky Way.

Most people today would have
trouble replicating Galileo’s ages-old feat, even with modern telescopes—not
because the stars and planets are dimmer, but because the earth has become much
brighter.

In an article in The New
Yorker titled The Dark Side, David Owen notes that a person standing on the
observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York City on a cloudless
night could not repeat that feat.A person today “would be unable to discern
much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright
stars—less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see
without a telescope.”

Thoughts
about Galileo, and about how our view of the heavens has changed over the past
400 years, come to mind this month during Earth Hour. That’s when millions of
people around the globe turned off unnecessary lights.

Earth Hour also got me
thinking about the role light plays in religion. Almost all religions use it as
metaphor for knowledge, wisdom, justice and other spiritual ideals
and goals.

Darkness, on the other hand, has most often been a common metaphor
for evil.

Since the world’s major
religions originated before electricity, it’s easy to see why light and dark
were such important concepts—there was so little light back then. The idea of God as light, piercing and
dispersing darkness, would have been immediately understood and appreciated by
all.

Today, that image is much
less meaningful. If we want light, we simply flick on a switch. We can
experience illumination 24 hours a day, if we want—something that would have
been very difficult, if not impossible, for most people not very long
ago.

The result? We fail to see
light as something special, or even miraculous; it has become just another
commonplace commodity that we take for granted.

If anything, we have too much light these days. The many
lights from buildings, streetlights, cars and other sources in large parts of
the developed world has created a condition called skyglow, the dome of light
that appears over major cities and washes out the night sky.

This light pollution, as astronomers call it, means that
those who study the skies have to go further and further afield to find places
are dark enough to permit decent stargazing.

To see skies like Galileo knew, you would have to travel
to the Australian outback or the mountains of Peru.

Does this mean that light is no longer a useful metaphor
for God or religious understanding? No. But it may have lost some of its power
and meaning today. What’s so special about light if you can have it whenever
you want it?

Maybe what we need today is a greater appreciation for
something we have so little of—darkness. Maybe instead of looking for God in
the light, we need to seek out the dark. Maybe that’s where God can more
readily be found.

Through something like Earth Hour, maybe we can appreciate
the dark in a whole new way. Perhaps it is only in great darkness that we can
fully see the light.